In 2013, someone paid me--considerably more than the standard five dollars per post--to write a blog post summarizing what was known about the moth genus Hemileuca. In 2013 it was possible to read all that Google found, about 23 species in the genus, in one day, and summarize it all in one blog post with a half-dozen free photos. There was no photo for H. dyari. Now Google offers a selection--of sad, dead museum pieces, mostly. 'This one is stored in a Florida museum with the note that it was found in Belize.
They live their whole adult lives on fat stored up from their time as caterpillars, and they don't store up much. Females, who are full of eggs, aren't as thin-ended as males, but once their eggs are laid females aren't very thick either.
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Hemileuca dyari (Draudt, 1930)
Another species that's under-documented on the Internet.
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Over ten years, the post quoted has been one of the most often viewed on this web site. This is getting embarrassing. In 2013, it seems, the scientists who study these things were reluctant to put information about the Hemileucas online because the study of this genus is one of the most dynamic and controversial things going on in the study of moths and butterflies. These moths really challenge the traditional understanding of what a species is.
If two lifeforms that look different can mate (without human help) and produce offspring, they're different varieties of one species...
is indeed a relative of
("Wild" rose image from Javier Martin, Wikipedia. Cultivated rose image from Mashrita.com.)
Crossbreeds between different species within a genus may look different from either parent, and may be born sterile or have other features that don't offer survival advantages. In honor of the best known example, such crossbreeds are sometimes called "mules."
If two lifeforms will not crossbreed naturally, they belong to different genera. (Horses, being a prey species that find safety in numbers, will join a herd of cows rather than isolate themselves--but there are no crossbreeds between horses and cows.)
But in the genus Hemileuca we find moths that look alike and may try to crossbreed, but not succeed, and moths that look different but produce healthy offspring. As a result some "species" have remained under-documented because, on close observation, scientists agreed that they were not really different species. Google shows almost nothing for Hemileuca clio, which is still found on some lists, because clio seems biologically to be just an exuberantly colored variety of H. electra.
Other Hemileucas, like dyari, are not well documented in English because they happen not to live in an English-speaking country. H. dyari live in Mexico and, if anyone has been studying their life history and habits, the study has yet to be published on the Internet. The Mexican government has published some documents, in the past ten years, acknowledging that dyari exists, but much remains to be learned.
For example, in the course of studying the water levels of a stream, Mexican scientists noted that several kinds of plants and animals lived along its banks, including Hemileuca dyari:
Another Mexican source notes that Hemileuca dyari is associated with the area described as the Eje Volcanico Transmexicano. The book is available from Google, which notes that the name Hemileuca dyari appears three times in the book, once on a map, once on a table identifying it with the region shown on the map, and once on a page Google expects people to buy the book to read. If anyone did want to buy Componentes Bioticos Principales de la Entomofauna Mexicana by J.J. Morrone, the link is https://books.google.com/books?id=qxpPYvuBeWMC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false
Another site notes that a specimen in the UNAM library was collected in Ayala, Morelos, but adds no more to the world's knowledge than that. We already knew that moths are insects, insects are arthropods, and arthropods are invertebrate animals. It is relevant to the study of the moth, and I for one wouldn't have known without looking it up, that Ayala is about 1200 meters above sea level and is located on the globe at Latitude: 18.764° | Longitude: -98.983°.
Counting all the Hemileucinae (Hemileuca and related genera like Automeris and Coloradia), Manuel A. Balcazar Lara asserts that over 550 species have been named, and 110 species and subspecies, in 15 genera, are found in Mexico. But then he does not go on to say which species those are, which ones he has observed, or anything he's observed about Hemileuca dyari.
One of several sites that have pages for H. dyari but have not filled them in mentions that a group called COSEWIC, the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada, think the Hemileucas are endangered. Hoot! People wish. The Hemileucinae may fill some sort of ecological niche, and in fundamentalist Christianity they are easily recognized as one of the manifestations of the curse placed on the ground for Adam's sake, but in some parts of North America local populations of Hemileucas hav gone extinct, and never been mssed. They were extinct in my town when I was a child, and came back in my late teen years, and everyone was happier without them.
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